White Peak Arena

We’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work cleaning up systems and re-working weapon handling. It’s hard to see progress when most of the new things are in the game feel and not content, so to keep motivated and get some shiny new visuals out, we came up with a new arena, codename “White Peak”. It’s a no-border arena where you can easily fall off the edges if you’re not careful enough.

The idea initially stems from an alternative environment codenamed “Black Peak”, which was the first iteration. We decided that for geological and lore reasons a lava mountain top that isn’t a volcano didn’t make sense. The characters were also difficult to make out in a high contrast lava glow environment, so the level was reworked to be a snowy mountain peak. It retained the aggressive contour of rock formations and the shape of the crack in the ground.

Himalayan flags and Medieval streamer pennants inspired the cloth elements that bring color back into an otherwise cold environment. They were done using Unity’s GPU cloth which is also used for the rope bridge in the background.

The depth fog effect was achieved with a depth blend shader on a plane, giving a relatively cheap way to render a camera independent fog. It helps visually separate the “arena” from the rest of the environment, and hides lack of textures and geometry detail in the background.